Small Shopping Sprees

I've never been into online shopping. I'm happy to buy things like concert tickets, but in general I'm pretty fussy so I don't like purchasing things unless I can see or feel them first. It's something I'm definitely trying to get over though. I want to get more involved in the general crafty community and support other people who make handmade things, and a lot of it seems to be online.

A while ago I came across an Australian site called Madeit through an unexpected source. Canteen are an amazing organisation that provide relief opportunities for kids living with cancer (go check them out and support them if you can). Their main fundraising event every year is Bandana Day, when they get volunteers to sell bandanas on the street for them. I've bought one every year since late high school, and my stash currently looks like this:

Two years ago I volunteered to be a seller. In the information package they sent me there was a flyer for Madeit and a suggestion to sew some bandanas into something and sell it. It seems that, like me, a lot of their sellers have a bandana overload!

I never did buy anything off Madeit, but their sister shop Craftumi is excellent. Craftumi sells supplies, and I can't find anything bad to say about it. Since it's local, orders ship really quickly, and a lot of the shops let you do direct bank deposits. Also, since it follows the model of having individual shops with vendors you deal with directly, communication about the status of your order is really good. A few fabrics from the Oli-store are from there: the Owls and the Deer came from Fabric Pixie, while HedgeHog Meadow came from DesignerFabricInOz.

I made a purchase more recently from Spoonflower, who I'd heard about a year ago from one of my friends. Spoonflower's an awesome idea - designers and artists can upload images that get printed as fabric. There's a huge number of designs on the site, and when I first visited a year ago I'd already found a lovely ladybug pattern I fell in love with.

I'd never gotten around to buying it mainly because the prices just seem to high. But late last November, I found out that they were having a two for one sale on fat quarters and I went nuts. I ended up buying the ladybugs along with 5 other lots of material from various shops. My favourite is (rather predictably) an elephant pattern. I made a pouch out of the ladybugs but haven't had a chance to make anything with the elephants yet - what should I make?

Elephant March by Endemic

The prime candidate for a shopping spree of this sort seems to be Etsy, but I just haven't managed to find that many things that I've fallen in love with yet. When I finally did make a purchase a couple of months ago it was only for some zippers for my pouches - not particularly exciting. I have had my eye on a particularly pretty nightgown for a while, but Steph got me one for my birthday so I'll have to have a think.

Bon Bon sleepwear by Sandmaiden

Where do you like to shop? Do you know any good handmade shops that sell online? Any recommendations would be awesome :)

All Puffed Up

A short while after I started sewing up pouches I started toying with the idea of adding things to them. One of the early successful experiments was the protective plastic, and I've made and sold about equal numbers of the normal and PVC coated versions. Aside from wanting to protect the fabric of the pouch itself, though, I've been wondering how to protect the things inside it for a while.

Padding is an odd concept to work with. Most protective cases I've had for electronics have been quite stiff and made of leather or plastic, but about a year or so ago when I needed a new camera case, it seemed a shame not to use some of the lovely brightly coloured material I had lying around.

Sorry about the picture quality - having my camera in the shot meant taking the photo on my phone!

The only padding I've ever really worked with has been for the padded hangers I make. It's pretty thick, and comes in big rolled up sheets. I'm not even entirely sure what it's called. I think the actual term for it is wadding. It seemed fluffy enough to protect my camera, so I started sewing a new pouch, and halfway through the process stuffed some of the wadding in between the lining and the outside. It came out ridiculously puffy. I figured I'd iron it, but that turned out to be a bit of a mistake when the whole padded inside shrunk! It's still very lightly padded though and seems to have protected my camera well enough for the last year.

One of my friends saw the padded case, and asked me if I could make one for her. This time, instead of stuffing the padding in between the layers, I actually sewed it in around the edges with the lining. I also didn't iron it, so it came out much puffier.

Aside from the fact that I picked a bit too small a zipper for the pouch, I quite like how it turned out. Working with new materials is always challenging but when it works out it's really rewarding. When my friend originally saw my camera case, I had only just picked up the fabric (My Little Helpers from Spellstone on Spoonflower) from the Post Office. Also, I only managed to sew the padding into the lining because I had a brand new sewing machine - my old one couldn't have handled it. I'm actually really excited about the new machine but it's getting late here in Sydney so I'll have to tell you the stories behind it and the new fabric another day!

Such Sweet Sorrow

Selling handmade items is a strange exercise. You invest so much of yourself, your time and your effort into making something useful and beautiful, but then you go ahead and give it away. I've been lucky in that everything I've sold has been something that I already own myself. Friends will see something I have, or that I'm wearing, and will ask me to make them a copy. This has meant that I've never really experienced separation anxiety when I deliver people's orders - until recently, that is.

Around Christmas time, one of my friends asked me if I'd make him some cushions to give as a present. Apparently his friend has a black leather couch, and that was the only requirement he gave me - the rest was up to me. I didn't have any material in my stash that I had enough of to make two cushions with, so I had to head off to find some.

I stumbled across a nice-looking fabric shop near Nick's house and decided to have a look one day. I was thinking of getting something white-ish for the cushions, and they had this really cool black and white square pattern in the shop. The material was some sort of cotton blend and it felt really nice to the touch. It was a tad pricey, but it was too nice to pass up.

Being the intelligent person I am, I went home, sat down to make the cushions, and realised that to make two cushions you have to buy four squares worth of material, not two like I'd just done. I thought the material would look nice with a plain white back so I headed off to another material store to find some heavy cotton. I discovered that a) thick plain cotton is actually really hard to find and b) white actually comes in many different shades and trying to find a white that matches another white you already have is almost impossible. Before I left for the shop Steph had been trying to convince me the cushions would look better with a black back, so I ended up leaving with a black synthetic type material - not ideal, but overall not bad.

Cushion covers aren't difficult to make. Aside from figuring out the closure for them (zippers, in my case), they're essentially just two big squares sewn together. I was having fun making them but wasn't particularly excited about seeing the result, until I actually pulled it out of the sewing machine and stuffed the cushion inside of it. This is what it looked like:

I don't know what happened, but all of a sudden I was in love with the thing. It was so soft and the print with the black backing was so nice and the material felt so good that I seriously just sat and hugged it for ten minutes. Whenever I sell something, I think I undervalue it a bit in terms of pricing. One of my friends once loved the pouch I made her so much that she insisted on giving me more money than I asked for it, and I was confused, but with the cushion I all of a sudden understood how you could pay a lot of money if you really loved something.

The idea of giving it away made me really sad, but thankfully I had Nick's shiny SLR camera on hand so I had a bit of a photo shoot with it.

It actually looked really good on my couch! If I can get my hands on some more of the material, I might be sneaky and make myself one. But until then, I hope its owner loves it as much as I do.

Christmas Cutting and Colouring

My family's always been into presents. I didn't realise until a few years ago that it was possible for people to 'not be present people'. Any celebration involving Steph, my parents and myself always involves some sort of cake and a lot of presents for the celebrant - it's just what we've always done. It's something that I've ended up extending to my friends, too, which possibly gets annoying at times - I routinely ignore any 'you don't have to bring me a gift' statement when I get an invitation to a party, and I usually get Christmas presents for my friends.

This year for Christmas I figured it would be nice to make something for everyone instead of buying things. I have a decently mixed group of friends - half guys and half girls, and everyone's interested in different things - so something edible seemed to be the go. Some of my fondest Christmas memories are of eating yummy sugar coated shortbread, so I figured I'd give it a stab. I went online to hunt down a recipe and found a nice looking Homemade Shortbread Recipe from allrecipes.com.

When I made a test batch, the dough seemed a bit wet, so I went ahead and just started adding flour until it seemed right. I didn't have any cookie cutters so I used my measuring cup as a stencil. They came out very short and crumbly but still very tasty. The extra flour made them a bit difficult to roll out but it was manageable enough.

I figured I'd be a bit more Christmasy for the actual presents and borrowed Nick's Christmas shaped cookie cutters. After rolling out the dough, I started pressing down on it with the cutters. They tessellated surprisingly well but it was a bit difficult to peel away the surrounding dough. Steph came over, saw what I was doing, and gave it a shot. Instead of just pressing the cutters down, she started wriggling them around in the dough, and they came out much more easily. Apparently I missed the cookie-cutter lesson at preschool!

My cookie cutting attempt	Steph's clearly superior skills

They took a surprisingly long time to bake but they made the kitchen smell fantastic. I'd never baked shortbread before this, and I got a bit impatient with the test batch and took them out a bit prematurely, so I didn't realise that they skip the golden brown stage and go straight to a toasted-brown colour. My oven's a bit uneven so the ones at the back were quite a bit browner, and the lighter ones definitely tasted better. If you're ever making shortbread definitely don't leave it in the oven for too long.

Finished product!	The slightly toasted cookies from the back of the oven

I made a double recipe, and after the first batch there was still quite a lot of dough left over that I left in the fridge. When I took it out two days later it was rock hard - it turns out that the dough gets particularly unmanageable when it's cold. If you're going to store it in the fridge make sure you take it out a couple of hours before you actually need it so it can warm back up to room temperature.

I wanted to try something fun with the second batch, and thought the sugar that you sprinkle on top of the cookies was something that I could play with. I was wondering aloud to my friend if coloured sugar was something that existed. Lo and behold, searching for 'coloured sugar' gives some nice recipes so I went ahead and gathered some supplies.

It seemed simple enough. In my mind I was expecting the food colouring drops to slowly seep into the sugar, but when I first dropped the food colouring in it curled up and formed a strange little green ball! Instead of the colour spreading through the sugar it looked like the sugar was just getting stuck to the drops of food colouring.

I figured I'd done something wrong, so I tried it again with less food colouring. It still did it though, so I figured I'd just see what happened if I did what the instructions said and shook the jar, and all of a sudden it worked. I did it with the other colours too and it looked amazing. If you're planning on making some, be careful with your food colouring to sugar ratio - I didn't like the colour of the red sugar, so I kept adding more food colouring, and it turned out very red but oddly sticky. If you're planning on storing the sugar instead of using it straight away, apparently you can leave it out to dry on some foil overnight to reduce some of the stickiness from the moisture in it.

Having coloured sugar makes it a lot more obvious where you've actually managed to sprinkle the sugar onto the cookie. I was doing it with a spoon and it wasn't coming out very evenly - it might've been a good idea to find some cheap disposable salt shakers and do it that way. Also, putting yellow sugar onto straw coloured cookies is a bit redundant. Overall, though, they looked very lovely and cheerful.

Trying to choose colours for the different shapes was interesting. The Christmas tree and candy cane shapes were obvious enough, but what colour do you make an angel? At the end of the day I just picked some colours and stuck to them.

Colouring wise, my favourites were the little gingerbread-man shaped cookies. Nick came up with the idea of giving them different coloured shirts and pants, and I managed to master my sugar-sprinkling skills enough to pull it off.

The cookies went out to a couple of different people, and they all made it safely enough, albeit a little bit crumbled. The candy cane and shooting star ones seemed especially fragile - having long thin segments of crumbly cookies probably wasn't the best idea. My mum thought I should have stuck to the original recipe instead of adding extra flour so they'd be nice and buttery instead of being very short, so I'll have to give it a go next time. Most of the people who I gave them to seemed to like them though. Apparently Nick's family's batch got gobbled up very quickly by his little cousins - I think that having a tick of approval from a batch of little kids is a pretty good sign that you've done something right!

Fabric-A-Brac

About a month ago, one of my lovely friends sent me a link to a rather irresistible event. As anyone even remotely crafty will tell you, having a drawer/box/wardrobe/bedroom's worth of material built up is a pretty common problem. Enter the Fabric-a-Brac! Essentially a market for material stashes, it looked like a decent opportunity for sellers to offload some old supplies and for buyers to grab a bargain.

To be honest, I wasn't expecting much and I already had a lot planned for the day, so I figured I'd just pop in for half an hour. My expectations seemed to be reinforced by the plastic flags and coloured paper flowers adorning the entrance to the building. But when I actually arrived, all of that was rather pleasantly blown the window.

Photo by Angus Forbes

The suite it was held in was both big and packed. There were tables and tables full of fabric and accessories, and wherever there wasn't a table, there was a person. A lot of the people were about my age too, which was reassuring. It was actually somewhat intimidating! As I may have mentioned before, I'm more of a knitter than a seamstress, so all the fabric sent my head into a spin.

Luckily one of the first tables I found was full of wool, so I managed to calm down a bit with something familiar. If you haven't noticed yet, my favourite colour is purple. I've told and told and told myself that I won't buy any more purple clothes or wool, but I just couldn't help myself. There were balls of a maroon cashmere/silk blend for $4 a pop. Usually something like that would cost about $12 at my local wool store, so I went ahead and snapped it up. I have a vague idea to make a little lacy bolero with it, but I have to try and find a pattern for one!

Photo by Angus Forbes

Having armed myself with some wool, I decided to take on the fabric. Most of the fabric shopping I've done previously has been based on whatever brightly coloured print catches my eye, and I don't have much of a handle on what to look for when it comes to different fabric compositions - although I do know that somewhat thickish, quilting-weight cotton makes for nice pouches. Narrowing in on something good when you're faced with this much unfamiliar product is hard though!


After circling around the whole studio once or twice and still having no idea, I fell back to my normal shopping method. Usually when I want to buy something I'll find something I like, walk out of the store, and if it's still on my mind about it an hour later I figure I actually do like it and I'll go back and buy it. Yes, I am somewhat indecisive. After two goes around the studio, the only thing that I was still thinking about was a small strip of thick textured cotton in a nice retro bluish print. I couldn't remember exactly where it was, so I went round again until I found it. Strangely enough the stall owner had no idea how much to sell it to me for so we just came to some mutual agreement on pricing - I don't even remember how much it was now! The material will be up in the Oli-store soon if you'd like a pouch made out of it.

The last stop was a table that I had spotted that was selling patterns. I've never sewn up a piece of clothing before, and to be honest sewing patterns scare me. But I've been wanting to try it for a while. I really want to make myself a skirt out of some sort of spotty black and white material that's a decent length - mid-length skirts are a surprisingly difficult thing to find in shops at the moment! I started rummaging through the pattern box and lo and behold, there was a nice skirt pattern. Even better, both the packaging and the store owner told me that it was an easy one to follow, so I added it to the shopping bag. The owner also told me that the pattern would look nice with some sort of lace or trimming on it, and I should go find myself some.

Luckily in my confused wandering around the studio I'd spotted a trimmings stall. I managed to score myself some black lace which would go nicely with any spotty black and white skirt material.

I really wanted to go find myself some material for the skirt, but by this point my 30 minutes was up. I left the studio very very reluctantly, but with a bag full of goodies. Hopefully it'll be on again sometime soon, and I can find a friend to go with who knows what they're looking for so I'm not completely lost!

It's Beginning to Feel A Lot Like Christmas...

How on earth is it December already? I can't complain though - Christmas is my favourite time of the year and around now is when you can just smell it in the air (especially if you're near a real tree).

I only just realised how long it's been since I posted a proper entry. I promise I haven't been being slack, it's mainly just that I've been a busy busy bee. I'll write up a lot about it soon, but just to give you a taste of what I've been up to, here's a sneak peek!

Project 365: Week 7

Day 43 (17/10/11)

Nick's been hanging out for a new iPhone for a while, so when the 4S was announced he pre-ordered one as soon as he could and it was delivered to his house one morning. I've had an iPhone 4 for a while, and putting them side to side they looked exactly the same. I took a photo of the only difference we could find between them :)

Day 44 (18/10/11)

It was lovely and sunny for the first time in a long time, so I had my sunnies lying around on my desk at work. For some reason we decided to see what my friend looked like in them - it's amazing the things you can find to distract yourself! He looked surprisingly okay, but not enough to convince him to actually wear them in public. What a shame.

Day 45 (19/10/11)

This packet of Skittles came home from America with Steph's boyfriend (along with my cow bowl). I love Skittles, and apparently once Steph saw these she just had to buy them for me and they came back a bit battered because she'd carried them all over the USA with her - thanks Steph! :) They surprisingly tasted a lot like the fruits they were meant to be, but the cores really didn't make much of a difference :p

Day 46 (20/10/11)

Thankfully after a couple of days the sun was still out. After leaving my glasses on the desk while I went for a quick walk, when I came back it appeared that Ernie had decided he wanted to sunbathe!

Day 47 (21/10/11)

It was time for the next set of work drinks after the Zombie shenanigans, so we had Oktoberfest at work. I've always loved German food, but I don't really like beer - makes it a bit difficult to celebrate the holiday properly! So I just ate a lot. I came a bit late and missed out on all the big hotdog buns they had for the BBQ, so the sausage to bread ratio ended up being somewhat comical :)

Day 48 (22/10/11)

Nick's cousin was getting married so we headed up north for the weekend. The wedding was lovely - out on the beach and barefoot on the sand. I've seen quite a few wedding cakes before, but theirs was pretty amazing with its crazy angles!

Day 49 (23/10/11)

The day after the wedding saw us sitting on a train home for three hours. Long commutes can get both tiring and boring, so while Nick napped I got productive with my laptop for as long as the battery would last. From what I remember, the text on the screen ended up being published as Starting From Scratch.